Regarding Those ‘Iron Man 2′ Rumors…

COMMENTS (28)

• Oh and to Erydan. We’re talking about Marvel Studios here. The Punisher has absolutely nothing to do with their production house. Neither does X-Men, Spiderman, Ghost Rider, etc. They no longer own the movie rights to those properties. If the new Punisher is any good (and I’ll be shocked if it is), Lionsgate will benefit from its success.

  Comment by Matty — Sunday June 15, 2008 @ 4:03pm PDT  Reply to this post

• First off, Jon’s not only one of the more stand-up guys in Hollywood, he’s a meticulous craftsman who cares about what he does. I think he knows more than anyone how much collective work went into making Iron Man as good as it was- hence the understandable concern that Marvel would announce a release date that might be not be possible to meet, without first consulting any of the people responsible for actually delivering the film. Let’s not forget that besides being a blockbuster hit, Iron Man represents a couple of years out of the guy’s life, so he ought to be forgiven for being emotionally invested in the sequel being good, whether he’s called upon to direct it or not. Which of course he wanted to be.

  Second, if a couple of thousand people deluged me for five weeks about the Big Party, and what I’m gonna wear, who I’m bringing, what time I’m going to get there, I don’t think I’d be an asshole in to say, “You know, um… I’m not sure, I haven’t actually been invited, yet.” Which is pretty much what everyone is jumping all over him for doing.

  Did he get lucky with Iron Man? Of course he did. He was lucky with Swingers, he was extremely lucky with Elf, and he was eleventh highest all time lucky with Iron Man. How many lucky home runs does a guy have to hit before he’s a hitter? Did he do it alone? Of course not. Was he supposed to? Robert Downey Jr. is brilliant. Jeff Bridges and Gwynneth Paltrow are brilliant. That’s why he cast them, fought for them, and then turned them loose to be brilliant in the movie, as good directors do.

  Comic book movies are incredibly tricky to pull off. You have a hard-core fan base of purists who are protective of the title. Like, Vatican protective. You have to tell them a story they already know like the back of their action figure in a way that surprises them at every turn. You also have a general audience who’s never heard of the character before- you have to start them from zero and bring them up to speed without losing them in insider shorthand or bogging down the film with exposition. You have to make two-dimensional pen and ink characters work in three-dimensional flesh and blood. You have to translate a vision that was created for the 1970′s and make it feel cutting-edge and relevant today (again, without angering the purists). You have to take 40 years of storyline and compress it into an hour and a half with three acts and it’s own closure, but without painting the franchise into a corner, and you have to do it all with a ton of CGI that you never get to see until long after the movie is shot. That’s pretty hard, all in all. Ang Lee’s one of the best director’s in the world, and I don’t think he pulled it off.

  I certainly don’t know how anybody can look at the movie, the reviews, the box office, the fan feedback, or Marvel’s stock price the next Monday and say Favreau didn’t do a terrific job. In the course one weekend, everybody went from thinking Marvel was a company with maybe four or five franchise titles, to thinking the sky’s the limit for the whole catalog.

  Comment by Anonymous — Thursday July 10, 2008 @ 5:48pm PDT  Reply to this post

• “Marvel thinks they had more to do with the development than Favreau did, so he’s disposable.”

  Iron Man has been around for 45 years. I think Favreau has, too. Guess which one will work on the next Iron Man movie no matter what.

  Comment by info4u — Thursday October 9, 2008 @ 8:16am PDT  Reply to this post